Gospel

About 12 years ago I engaged in some lengthy dialogue with a fellow graduate student who had abandoned his Christian faith upon reading Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. Below is one of the emails I sent to “Oleg” (not his real name).

Dear “Oleg”

Please allow me to begin by first expressing my profoundest sorrow over the terrible experiences you have been through. I cannot possibly understand the hurt and anguish these things have caused you. I can only say how sorry I am that this has happened to you and that I hope that in spite of it all, you are able to clearly distinguish between the wickedness of the persons that took advantage of you and the goodness of the God they so poorly represented in your case. My heart truly ached within me when I read your email. I know these words of mine may not mean that much, and certainly they can’t erase your personal history or the present feelings that history may yet arouse within you, but please know that I truly and deeply hurt for you because of this. 

I also want to apologize for taking so long to send a response to your last two emails. Despite the passage of so much time, I still, regrettably, have no elaborate treatise to offer you in defense of my position. I have no knock-down argument to give to you. And truthfully, my suspicion is that given the rather lofty standard of evidence you have raised for justifiable belief in God (namely, a theophany), there is not much I can say that you will likely find especially compelling. Nevertheless, I will try. 

And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

1 Cor. 2:1-5

These are Paul’s words from 1 Cor. 2:1-5.  I want to focus in on verse 2. Paul told the Corinthians, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” This statement is a familiar one in the writings of Paul. He wrote the Galatians:  “Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Similarly, he told the church at Philippi: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” 

The question which occupies us this morning is the purpose of Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians as it pertains to the situation in that particular church, namely its quarreling and disunity. Let’s look at a little context and see if we can’t make sense of that.

One must distinguish between what must be objectively true for salvation to be possible and what one must personally embrace to be saved. No one can be, nor needs to be saved in the fullest sense of the term unless 1) God exists as Unity and Trinity; 2) humans are depraved, condemned, and perishing; 3) Christ was the virgin born, sinless, God Incarnate who died and rose again for our sins, ascended into heaven, is presently interceding for the saints, and is coming again to complete our redemption.

Those doctrines must be objectively true for salvation to be possible. But not all those truths must be explicitly embraced today for one to be saved. Minimally, one must believe that 1) God exists (Heb. 11:6); 2) that he is estranged from God because of his sins (Rom. 3:23); 3) that he is incapable of reconciling himself to God by any quality or quantity of self-effort (Rom. 3:20); and 4) that Jesus Christ, as God Incarnate (Matt. 1:23), is the perfect and only Mediator between God and man (1 Tim. 2:5-6) who died for our sins and rose from the dead for our justification (Rom. 4:24-25; 1 Cor. 15:3-4). 

Ultimately, the basic condition for receiving salvation for all morally accountable people in all dispensations is faith. But while the condition for receiving salvation has never changed, the content of the gospel of salvation has changed from its seminal introduction in Genesis 3:15. For example, the content of the gospel that Abraham believed is obviously different from the content of the gospel that one must believe today (Gen. 12:1-3, 15:1-6; Gal. 3:8). But Abraham’s response to the gospel he received is still the model response that we must follow today (Rom. 4:23-24). We must, like Abraham,  be fully persuaded that what God has promised, namely eternal life through faith in His Son (1 Jn. 5:10-13), He is also able to perform.